Populist Vein Resurfaces in Protests

By

Gerald F. Seib

Updated Sept. 15, 2009 11:59 pm ET

The buses that rolled into the U.S. capital over the weekend, carrying protesters steamed up about government spending and decrying the advent of "socialism," may appear to represent a rich new vein in American politics.

In fact, though, these Tea Party Patriots and like-minded brethren represent the latest resurfacing of a vein that has always been there and that simply goes below ground from time to time. This vein is populist and antiestablishment; it alternates between suspicion of government in general, and anger at the idea that government seems to be doing more to help fat cats or the other guy. In some fashion or another, it has been around since the time George Washington quelled the Whiskey Rebellion.

Today's anti-tax, antigovernment protesters have much in common with the Ross Perot foot soldiers of the 1990s, says WSJ's Executive Washington Editor Gerald Seib.

The last big appearance came when Ross Perot tapped into it in the 1990s. Mr. Perot, who ran for the presidency in 1992, when he got 19% of the vote, and in 1996, didn't create the movement then, any more than Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck has created it now. He simply gave voice to it.

There are differences, of course, between the Perot foot soldiers and the protesters who now show up at town-hall meetings and marched on the Capitol on Saturday. The Perot phenomenon arose out of anger at a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, while today's movement bores in on a Democratic one, Barack Obama. The Perot movement tended to focus on the dangers of deficits, while today's more generally is focused on government spending -- and there's a subtle but important difference.

But the movements of then and now have a lot more in common, and there are some lessons to be learned about today's politics by looking back at what transpired in the '90s.

During the flowering of the Perot movement, I spent some time chronicling the comings and goings of a group of Perotistas in Pennsylvania. They jumped on the Texas billionaire's bandwagon early, later moved out to form their own political party (called, in a precursor of today's movement, the Patriot Party), then joined forces again with Mr. Perot when he formed his own national third party, the Reform Party.

It would be hard to find political activists whose motives were more pure, almost innocently so. Yet like most insurgents, the Pennsylvania folks also spent a fair amount of time arguing with one another -- often over whether they loved Mr. Perot or were being controlled by him and his organization -- and occasionally lapsed into internal squabbles with roots in local battles of days gone by.

But they knew they were angry, felt they had little say within the two existing parties and were worried most of all about how their tax dollars were being spent -- all the same hallmarks of today's movement. It's highly likely, in fact, that some folks who were Perotistas then are Tea Party Patriots now.

These aren't partisan movements. The Perot followers were first angry at the first President Bush, then later easily transferred some of that anger to a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Mostly they were mad at the establishment. Eventually, in fact, many ultimately focused their anger on Mr. Perot himself, after they came to believe he was trying to manipulate them. Which leads to lesson No. 2:

Movements like these aren't easy to control. If a citizen is motivated by anger that the government is trying to control his life, he isn't likely to easily accept the idea that some other person or institution is trying to control him, either. Some of today's insurgents are angry at bank bailouts, some at the government takeover of auto companies, some at the prospect of a bigger government role in health care -- but the unifying characteristic is that they are angry at any kind of central control at all. Republicans who think they can harness Tea Party Patriots and their anger may be in for a rude surprise of their own.

It isn't really ideological. Perot followers were often thought to be conservatives, but one of their most powerful motivating forces was antipathy to free trade -- a classically conservative idea. Similarly, it's doubtful now that many of those senior citizens on the buses want their Medicare coverage turned into a voucher program, as some conservatives suggest, or share the view of many economic conservatives that the country benefits overall from immigration.

The movement is very much about how the government spends money. The Perot army and today's share that much in common -- but this also is an area where they diverge in an important way. What agitated Mr. Perot, and by extension his followers, was the idea that the government was spending money it didn't have, borrowing to finance the practice, and driving up the federal deficit in the process. It was shoddy management almost as much as spending that angered them. To rectify that, Mr. Perot advocated not just spending cuts but tax increases, including a hefty gasoline tax.

Today's protesters are more vocal about the level of spending, less about the way it's being financed. Thus, the protesters don't rally around a cry of "lower deficits," but rather "less government." It's more than a semantic difference -- and also a natural, perhaps even predictable, reaction to a period of intense government effort to rescue financial markets and the economy.

WSJ opens select articles to reader conversation to promote thoughtful dialogue. See the 'Join the Conversation' area to the rightbelow for stories open to conversation. For more information, please reference our community guidelines. Email feedback and questions to moderator@wsj.com.